There is no shortage of cultural biennials. The most celebrated may be Venice, but cities and regions across the world use the format – for good and bad – for a variety of reasons. The Biennial Foundation’s website currently lists 304 with an interactive map clearly showing that Europe greatest densities of biennials of any global region.

So, it may not have been noticed when Contour Biennial, running in the Belgian city of Mechelen began to stutter away from the two-year model. Founded in 2003, it ran in the traditional rhythm until 2019, after which four years passed before the 10th edition. When the 11th didn’t appear in 2025 it may have been thought that the final edition had taken place, but local institutions and creatives were busy strategising a new future, one rooted in collectivism, community, and opening up the city to contemporary art.




The new no-profit organisers, Contouristen, is made up of a group of local curators, artists, and cultural workers, proud of their city’s culture even if the more celebrated visual art attractions of Brussels and Antwerp are only about 20 minutes away by train to the south and north respectively. The city of 85,000 people is well known nationally for jazz and theatre, but modern visual art has largely been limited to Kunsthal Mechelen, an arts space that ran in different forms from 1958 before finding its new home of De Garage and contemporary approach in 2000.

Once the residence of the city’s 15th century aristocracy, it’s fair to say that De Garage’s architecture has been altered over the years. The industrial-looking spaces of the Kunsthal were designed in 1925 by locally-celebrated architect Jos Chabot as a car garage, then used as a salesroom for American vehicles, before reopening as a petrol station. Now, it offers fuel for the mind and is the central focus of the newly reborn Contour Biennale, curated by Sofia Lemos.

Contour has always been focused on moving and time-based art, but it takes that remit with a broad brush, as evidenced by Their weft, the grass (2025), the biennale’s opening work by June Crespo. A sculptural work filling the Kunsthal’s front room, a highly-reflective fabric stretched over metal framework looks inconsequential – even accidental – but is subtle in its changes over the day’s light and passing movement. It not only speaks to Contour’s breadth of approach, but also its invitation to the city’s public: the work entirely legible from the street, looking out at everybody walking by and directly addressing the UNESCO-recognised tower of St. Rumbold's Cathedral.




Elsewhere inside the dark spaces of the Kunsthal, most works are more traditional artist-film presentations. Yuyan Wang’s Boring Billion (2026) topically considers the automation of nature with a film, swimming and running robots uncannily existing seamlessly in our ecosystem. The work is dispassionate, simply asking questions around future nature and potentially our place within it.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s narrative film The Boat People (2020) also sits near the end of humanity, inviting poetic contemplation. A band of children explore abandoned landscapes, discovering remnants of civilised humanity. Relics and statuary that today we understand as part of our linear progress have here lost all meaning and context, the youngsters working to understand the before-times, what was left behind, and the debris they inherit.




Al-Mather Plot 1991 (2025) is a fascinating exploration of another future, but one from the early 1990s Gulf Region from artist Ayoung Kim. Focusing on a housing complex built in Riyadh by the South Korean Hanyang Corporation for an expected surge in Korean migrants who never arrived due to the Gulf War. Instead, the complex became home to displaced Kuwaitis, with Kim weaving together fascinating domestic, geopolitical, and architectural histories all tied together by oil and its associated economies.

The Kunsthal closes with a light-playing, room-filling installation by duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela. In a medley of five works, layered projections overlap with still images, cyanotype projections turn the air blue, and reflected light flickers through the space with umbra and penumbra.

Lemos’ curation is designed not just to show work, but also show Mechelen. Organised as a route that leads from the Kunsthal to the grand entrance of an architects, a new non-profit arts space, an Archbishop’s park, and a former ecclesiastical care institution and hospice. Walkable, a visitor could do it in a day while also finding time to stop off for moules-frites and beer or popping into some of the city’s other fascinating architectural history: the view from the cathedral tower (after 514 steps) is vast, while the Bibliotheek Mechelen, a Baroque monastery turned into an incredible municipal library by Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten, are both worth a detour.

When dmvA architects constructed a suite of buildings comprising apartments and their own HQ in 2025, they incorporated an art gallery at the ground and basement levels. Viewable from the street, two animated flies are trapped onto fly-paper, and in their sticky situation they flirt, serenade, and ultimately copulate – an affectionate, tender, and horny end to their existence. Artist Özgür Kar has set it all against a theremin interpretation an Andalucian gypsy balley, love conquering time, place, and culture, though so too does death.




At De Noker, a fourteenth century religious and care institution wrapping a cathedral-esque courtyard, four more works are presented, suitably related to care, empathy, and interdependence. Lisa Spilliaert observes three generations of women in her family in Tokyo. Lucia Martinez Garcia thoughtfully documents her sister’s gender transition. Ana Vaz offers a tribute in film to Guilherme Vaz, her father and Brazilian sound art pioneer, a study of natural and emotional landscape.

Originally presented at the chapel of Les Musées de Marseille, Laure Prouvost’s monumental sculpture and sound work Mère We Sea (2025) fits as if it was for the chapel at De Noker it has relocated to. Glass fish dance around a suspended bauble bursting with femininity – Prouvost’s ongoing interest in motherhood here also picked up on the French pun on sea/mother in the title. Against it all, a 7.1 surround sound score of child voices throb in the chapel with memories of mothers, grandmothers, marine life, and care.




Though compact, Contour manages to present a variety of Mechelen’s architectures: The Kunsthal’s modernism, De Noker’s historic spaces, and dvmA’s contemporary intervention. Tack Tick offers another unique location, with their involvement in Contour marking the inauguration of a new second space for the Antwerp-based non-profit cultural organisation.

Antwerp’s Tick Tack is based in a protected 1955 brutalist block by architect Léon Stynen. In it, co-founders Tijs Lammar and Mathias Swings commission new works from international artists. Their expansion into Mechelen takes a counter-approach in a decidedly different architecture, and this switch is reflected in the playful decision to reverse the name to Tack Tick.




An 1882 neoclassical building that for a century was where the objects and properties of deceased Mechelaar were organised and auctioned, now offers Tack Tick a completely different architecture within which to present than Tick Tack. Instead of new commissions, the organisation will host projects made by other European small- and medium-sized institutions, the kind of projects they themselves commission in Antwerp then hope to find partners to also present afterwords. Such an approach speaks to the collaborative, shared ecosystem approach Contour’s rebirth is also part of, while also supporting the Kunsthal with a strategic plan to improve the city’s contemporary art offering for local residents and visitors.

Sited in a prominent position in the city centre, one of Mechelen’s many streams – now open to daylight after a gradual de-culverting programme to counter modernist ‘improvements’ – leads to its handsome façade. Inside are two spaces once used for auctions, only an unusual low stage-level in each hinting at the former use. Today, they offer neat, well-proportioned spaces for art occupied here by Gabriel Abrantes and Claudia Pagès Rabal.

Abrantes takes on the larger of the two spaces with Bardo Loops (2024), a four-channel animated video installation featuring abandoned architectures, burning nature, and end-of-world devastation. Within these spaces, ghostly characters drift through grief, desire, anger as planetary decline is embodied. In a darkened room that once saw belongings and homes of the dead auctioned off, mirroring questions of survival and value arise.

Watermarks: Towers, Castles, Dogs, and Laia (2025) is shown elsewhere in Tack Tick, a short, punchy work of images that ripple onto the venue’s wall via a laser beam. Derived from 15th century watermarks from Catalonia, where the artist grew up, the laser traces the castles, dogs, and towers of the title, renderings that skim the surface of the architecture as temporal graffiti. If the original watermarks carry a simplified aesthetic of Catalonian landscape and identity not on but in the paper, here also the digital enlargements are surface-less, and their further-lost meaning is reinforced through soundtrack of the artist’s two-year-old niece grasping at definitions away from their intended meanings.




It can sometimes be difficult to discern an underlying curatorial message within a thing as spatially and artistically complex as a biennale. Lemos’ curation takes pleasure in pushing against some of the confines of moving image work, with Prouvost’s sound sculpture and Crespo’s reflective piece joined by a pair of bronzes by Rodrigo Hernández in the Stiltetuin, a secluded walled garden adjoined to the Archbishop’s Palace. It asks questions around the value of moving images in the past and into our futures, around their slippery nature as well as their use to solidly document and record slippery human emotions such as empathy, fear, and care.

The curation, however, operates as more than as a series of works and as a pathway to discover Mechelen, but also as a means for Mechelen to rediscover a new form of coming together. As a model, it is one designed to help reinforce new connections within city practitioners and institutions, but also reach wider internationally to ensure that such collective ambition is seen and received outside of its own place.

During the Northern Renaissance at the end of the 15th century, Mechelen was renowned as a home of artisans, composers, printers, and painters, part of a wider network of flourishing European cities. In its own way, Contour is seeking some of that spirit for its own rebirth, moving images into unexpected places as a way to think both inwards and outwards.